However,
I am shocked by the cynicism and dishonesty that Theresa May exhibited
in manufacturing an election on false grounds and in contradiction to
her often repeated promise.

Two
weeks ago she was telling journalists and her own MPs to their faces
that there would be no poll under 2020, while planning the current
campaign with her closest advisers.

Her
excuse – the threat to Brexit – is palpably untrue. She triggered
Article 50 by a majority of 5 to 1. She, a Remain voter, has embraced
not just Brexit but the hardest and most damaging type of Brexit, partly
because she is in thrall to her own extremists and the anti-European
press, and partly because she thinks she can use it to divide her
opponents.

Nothing of this makes her a suitable candidate to be Prime Minister.

I am happy to fight this as a Brexit election, if she wants. As I’ve written beforeI
think Brexit and in particular May’s hard Brexit – out of the single
market, out of the customs union, cosying up to dictatorships in a
desperate effort to replace lost European trade – is a disaster for our
country on social, economic, cultural and security terms.

However,
if we let Brexit be the only issue, we let this Government off the
hook. Brexit is Britain’s downhill path, and the harder it is, the
steeper the decline. But it is also a distraction from the more urgent
and more dramatic collapse of our public services and quality of life.

Let me highlight just three immediate crises that affect people in H&F every day.

Charing Cross – disaster delayed but not avoided

Charing
Cross Hospital was zoned for demolition and downgrading from a major
emergency hospital to a glorified clinic and treatment centre in 2012.
That scheme should now be underway, with the bulldozers on site.

But
pressure on services has only grown in the last five years, leading to
longer waiting times, and a redoubtable campaign by the Save our
Hospitals group and H&F council has forced the demolition plans to
be put off until 2021.

So,
good news, except the threat still hangs over the Hospital, and as a
result it is in slow decline from failure to attract staff and a lack of
basic maintenance.

I want Charing Cross to have its future as a major, world class hospital guaranteed.

Schools out – of money

Every
single school in H&F is seeing its budget cut for the first
time in two decades. Starting in 2013 the cuts have accelerated and by
2020, if this government is re-elected, will amount to 15% or even 25%
for some schools.

These are huge and unsustainable cuts, meaning basic supplies, like books and stationery, and teaching jobs will go.

After
just seven years of Tory government we are again seeing scenes from the
1990s when, after four terms in office, school roofs leaked and
patients were backed up on trolleys in hospital corridors, or died on
waiting lists.

Housing

Homelessness
has risen 130% since 2010. That was not inevitable. In the previous
ten years under Labour it fell by three quarters. But this is only the
worst symptom of the housing crisis, which sees developers building
luxury blocks for sale overseas, while local people cannot afford to
rent or buy anything in the borough.

A
Conservative government will not build affordable homes, will not help
people onto the housing ladder and will not tackle the high rents and
low standards in the private rented sector.

These are the issues on which I will be campaigning in this election. See you on the road.

06 April 2017

Businesses in Fulham - and in neighbouring Chelsea - are being hammered by a huge 22.8% average increase in business rates, according to thegovernment's own leaked figures.

These are rates set by the government and collected for the government by local councils.

Everyone from Hammersmith & Fulham Labour council to the Chelsea Society has urgedGregHands, the Conservative MP for Chelsea & Fulham, to press the government not to destroy local business through the rates.

But they've drawn a blank.

Gallivanting Greg's Twitter feed is one long hymn of self-praise about his trips around the world as a trade minister. Yet when it comes to helping business on his own doorstep, he won't raise a squeak.

27 March 2017

More on the naughty attempts by H&F Conservatives to pretend to residents they're against government plans to cut our schools' budgets while actually backing the cuts.

Councillor Caroline Ffiske is the H&F Conservative opposition's spokesperson on education. On Tuesday, she made out to residents the Conservatives were on their side. On Wednesday, she revealed their true colours.

At the meeting, Caroline Ffiske was keen to give the impression she opposed the cuts. She said:

“Obviously here in Hammersmith and Fulham, we’re one of the losers by 3 per cent so please email me. I’ve brought my card. Everyone who emails me, I promise I will forward your email to [Education Secretary] Justine Greening’s staff, and to Greg Hands MP and really help build up a voice here in Hammersmith & Fulham to say…let’s aim high and let’s level up funding.”

Yet the next morning, the same Councillor Ffiske showed her true colours by blogging a completely different message.

She started with this eccentric comment:“Last night I attended the LBHF Save our Schools rally where the Labour Council committed to fight against fairness in school funding.(Labour against fairness – hurray!)”

She then vigorously defended the government’s schools cuts programme, describing it as "great", "transparent" and "truly fair".

And she feebly advised residents to make useless peripheral recommendations on“weightings”for the“funding formula”– nothing that would go anywhere near stopping the tsunami about to hit H&F schools.

If Conservative councillors choose to back the Conservative government against local parents, schools and pupils, while we disagree with them, we accept that’s their honest view.

But for the Conservative education spokesperson to describe H&F schools in the evening as "losers" from the government's plans and then in the morning praise the "great" plans is something no-one should accept.

But gas-guzzling Greg's love of big cars doesn’t only
influence his personal life — it has also seen him come out against a
popular environmental policy in Hammersmith & Fulham.

H&F’s Labour council voted in January to
recognise climate change as “one of the greatest dangers facing the world”.
Smith’s Tories refused, however, to back a statement acknowledged by almost every climate
scientist across the globe.

The council motion called on all levels of
government to take action to address climate change.

Yes, "pence" - even though the council's pension fund is set to reach £1
billion pounds.

While Smith is known neither for his grasp of finances
nor his support for the environment, managing both to attack a sensible
green policy and to describe a billion pounds as pence is a surprising
achievement, even for him.

15 March 2017

A petition has started on change.org to get Conservative MP (and government minister) Greg Hands to do the right thing by his constituents in Fulham (and Chelsea) and support local children, parents and schools against planned government funding cuts.

"Greg Hands is the MP for Fulham & Chelsea. His borough will be the 9th most affected area by the proposed new school funding formula. Despite his constituents asking him to support their childrens' education, he believes this new formula will 'end unfairness for all' and is not doing anything. Sign this petition to ask Greg Hands to reconsider and support his constituency's schools and childrens' futures."

13 March 2017

Donald Trump may not have many fans among Hammersmith &
Fulham’s residents but he’s got one among the local Tories if Cllr Robert
Largan’s peddling of an “alternative fact” to his constituents is anything to
go by.

In an email to bemused Sands End residents, Largan has made the
remarkable claim: ‘Labour’s attitude to Sands End was recently revealed
in a report…outrageously describing the area as “a region of poverty
and squalor”.’

Shocking stuff. But perhaps not quite the way Cllr Largan
intended.

The phrase “a region of
poverty and squalor” is actually from a2004Character Profile of Studdridge Street
by council officers – a profile that was itself referring to the area in the
early 1900s:

Sadly, what Cllr Largan forgot to tell residents is that he
and his Conservative colleagues actually voted against the 33 new Sands End
homes(again, see 17.2here).

Yup, Robert Largan voted against new
social housing – which H&F Conservatives didn't build, hence the crying
need now – and abused the related planning document to trumpet an easily
disproved “alternative fact” about Labour.

11 March 2017

With parents, teachers and school governors from across the
political divide coming out in support of H&F Labour council's campaign to
Support our Schools, you might think H&F Conservatives would put aside
party differences and join in.

You'd be wrong.

The government is proposing to slash schools’ budgets in H&F
by three per cent.

Forty-seven of the borough’s head
teachers are backing the campaign to protect school funding.

This comes at a time when schools face huge cost pressures from inflation,
the teachers' recruitment crisis and rising business rates.

For a primary
school in H&F, the combined burden will be over £100,000 per year. For secondary
schools, it will be much more.

And yet Cllr Caroline Ffiske, who is the H&F Conservative opposition's spokesperson on education,
calls the cuts “great”, “transparent” and “truly fair”.

The Tories ramped up their support for their government cuts this month
when Cllr Ffiske wrote a blog
post defending them.

Instead of calling for proper funding for
all schools in the UK, Ffiske supported redistributing funds away from
H&F and disingenuously advised residents to call for short-term amendments around the
edges of the funding formula.

Conservative Budget 2017: Chancellor raises National Insurance rates to the approval of H&F Tory councillor, Charlie Dewhirst, who shows contempt for the self-employed while jeering at journalists for reporting the Tories' broken promise.

"The oral evidence we heard from the Local Government Association and from the Leader of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Cllr Stephen Cowan, cast some doubt on how thorough the consultation undertaken by the Home Office to establish the capacity of local authorities to take more migrant children had been. It was suggested that up to a further 4,000 places might be made available by local authorities if additional central funding could be provided. Councillor Cowan told us: 'If I talk to council leaders across London, there is certainly extra capacity'"

Andy Elvin, chief executive of the Adolescent and Children's Trust, was even more straightforward:

"This is a lie; there is no other way to describe this egregious attempt to blame local authorities for a decision that has been wholly made in the Home Office, which has made no reasonable effort to examine what capacity there is in the system."

04 March 2017

A little bird tells us that some Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative councillors are so worried about losing their seats at the next council election that they're begging Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea Tories to come and campaign for them on the streets of Hammersmith and Fulham.

We wonder if these will be the same Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea councillors who came together with Hammersmith & Fulham Conservatives when they ran the council to undertake a shameful privatisation of the transport that takes disabled children to and from school.

The appalling contractors they appointed after a botched procurement left tube-fed children overheating for hours in minibuses, autistic children running into traffic and much more.

When the newly elected Labour council at Hammersmith & Fulham tried to put matters right after May 2014, the Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea Tory leadership said they were just making trouble and refused to take action. It took hundreds of parents of disabled children to protest before they started to listen.

Now these shamed Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea Tories are apparently going to come and trudge the streets of Hammersmith and Fulham pleading with people to vote for their equally shamed mates.